Question

trying to catch the characters at the start the string and newlines the string is

.V/1LBOG\n.F/AV0094/08NOV/SAL/Y\n.E/0134249356001"

the regular expression i am using is from the string above i need to catch .V/ and .E/

^.[VE]/*

But it only seems to ctach .V/ can anyone see why as i thought ^ means newlines aswell as start of strings ? any help will be very gratefull as ive had this problem for a while now. If this is not the correct way as in doing this could you propose a different way.

Answer 1

Regex 101:

^ means start of string. And you guessed it right. There can only be one start of string.

^.[VE]/*

means :

Match start of string, followed by any character (other than newline), followed by either a V or a E, followed by 0 to n / (greedy).

Probably you want something like this :

\.[VE].*?(?:\\n|$)

Which means match a dot, followed by V or E and match everything until \n or end of string.

Comment if I am wrong.

So .V/1LBOG\n.F/AV0094/08NOV/SAL/Y\n.E/0134249356001"

Looks like this ?

.V/1LBOG
.F/AV0094/08NOV/SAL/Y
.E/0134249356001"

If yes, then you need to change your regex a little bit:

\.[VE].*

Abusing the fact that . does not match newlines by default.